About

I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. I was trained in human geography, cultural anthropology, and environmental science, with prior experience working in international conservation and development. In my research, I bring together scholarship from political ecology, science studies, and institutional theory to explore questions of power, knowledge, environmental justice, and social change.

I apply an ethnographic approach to the study of environmental politics, focusing on the everyday practices and lived experiences of the people who constitute the worlds of global environmental governance. I completed my PhD at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management (ESPM) in late 2017. My dissertation explored the influence of “ecosystem services” concepts in biodiversity conservation. This work began in British Columbia but expanded to encompass multiple sites across broader transnational policy networks, bringing me from Japan and Brazil to Turkey, Germany, and Burma — a range of other locales in between — and finally back to Canada and California. My research has been supported by a number of awards including grants from SSHRC, the National Science Foundation, and UC Berkeley. I have written for the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Human Geography, Conservation and Society, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Research in Economic Anthropology.

I am from Vancouver and attended UBC as an undergraduate, where I studied Anthropology and Environmental Science before completing an MA in Geography at the University of Toronto. Before beginning grad school, I spent a year living in the central Philippines, where I led marine research and monitoring initiatives for an organization supporting community-based marine protected areas. I recently moved to Vermont from Oakland (California) which was my home for six years. When I wasn’t hunched over my computer, I was often up in the Berkeley hills making the most of California before they made me graduate. I look forward to more running, cycling, hiking, camping, and many other -ings related to being outdoors while I wait for Vermont to thaw.

A nice lake in Norway (Skjolden) frequented by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom I learned briefly worked at a nearby lemonade factory in 1921